When Gravity Fails (9 page)

She paused just long enough for me to cram a few words in. I got myself my gin and bingara with Rose’s, and Yasmin had a Jack Daniels with a Coke back. Then Jo-Mama started in on another story, and I watched her like a hawk, because sometimes she starts the stories so you’ll get all caught up in them and forget you’ve got change coming. I never forget. “Let me have the change all in singles, Mama,” I said, interrupting her story and reminding her, in case my change had slipped her mind. She gave me an amused look and made the change, and I kicked her a whole kiam for a tip. She stuffed it into her bra. There was plenty of room in there for all the money I’d ever see in my lifetime. We finished our drinks after two or three more stories, kissed her good-bye, and wandered further up the Street. We stopped in Frenchy’s and a few other places, and we were satisfactorily loaded by the time we got home.

We didn’t say a word to each other; we didn’t even pause to turn on a light or go to the bathroom. We had our clothes off and were lying close together on the mattress. I ran my fingernails up the back of Yasmin’s thighs; she loves that. She was scratching my back and chest; that’s what I like. I used the tips of my thumb and fingers to touch her skin very lightly, just barely tickling her, from her armpit up her arm to her hand, and then I tickled her palm and her fingers. I ran my fingertips back down her arm, down her side, and across her sexy little ass. Then I began touching the sensitive creases of her groin the same way. I heard her start to make soft sounds, and she didn’t realize her own hands had fallen beside her; then she began touching her breasts. I reached over and grabbed her wrists, pinning her arms to the bed. She opened her eyes in surprise. I grunted softly and kicked her right leg aside, a little roughly, then I spread her left leg with mine. She gave a little shudder and moan. She tried to reach down to touch me, but I wouldn’t let go of her wrists. I held her immobile, and I felt a strong, almost cruel sense of control, yet it was expressed in the most caring and tender way. It sounds like a contradiction; if you don’t feel the same thing sometimes, I can’t explain it to you. Yasmin was giving herself to me wordlessly, completely; at the same time I was taking her, and she
wanted
me to take her. She liked me to get a little wild now and then; the moderate force I permitted myself to use only aroused her more. Then I entered her, and we let out our breath together in a sigh of pleasure. We began to move slowly, and her legs lifted; she put her heels on my hips, digging in and holding on, as close to me as she could get, while I was driving into her as close to
her
as possible. We jammed like that, slowly, drawing out every gentle touch, every surprise shock of roughness, for a long while. Yasmin and I still clung to each other, our hearts thumping and our breath ragged and quick. We clung until our bodies quieted, and still we held each other, both satisfied, both exhilarated by this restatement of our mutual need and our mutual trust and, above all else, our mutual love. I suppose at some time we separated, and I suppose at some time we fell asleep; but in the late morning when I awoke, our legs were still entwined, and Yasmin’s head was on my shoulder.

Everything had been fixed, everything had indeed returned to normal. I had Yasmin to love, I had money in my pocket to last a few months, and whenever I wanted it, there was action. I smiled softly and slowly drifted back into untroubled dreams.

6

It was one of those rare times of shared happiness, of perfect contentment. We had a feeling of expectation, that what was already wonderful would only get better and better as time went on. These moments are one of the rarest, most fragile things in the world. You have to seize the day; you have to recall all the rotten, dirty things you endured to earn this peace. You have to remember to enjoy each minute, each hour, because although you may feel like it’s going to last forever, the world plans otherwise. You want to be grateful for every precious second, but you simply can’t do it. It’s not in human nature to live life to the fullest. Haven’t you ever noticed that equal amounts of pain and joy are not, in fact, equal in duration? Pain drags on until you wonder if life will ever be bearable again; pleasure, though, once it’s reached its peak, fades faster than a trodden gardenia, and your memory searches in vain for the sweet scent.

Yasmin and I made love again when we woke at last, this time on our sides, with her back to me. We held each other close when we finished, but only for a few moments, because Yasmin wanted to live life to the fullest again. I reminded her that this, too, was just not in human nature—at least as far as I was concerned. I wanted a little longer to savor the gardenia, which was still pretty fresh in my mind. Yasmin really wanted another gardenia. I told her to wait another minute or two.

“Sure,” she said, “tomorrow, with the apricots.” That’s the Levantine equivalent of “when pigs fly.”

I would have loved to jam her right then until she cried for mercy, but my flesh was still weak. “This is the part they call the afterglow,” I said. “Sensitive, voluptuous people like me value it as much as the jamming itself.”

“Fuck that, man,” she said, “you’re just getting old.” I knew she wasn’t being serious, that she was just riding me—or trying to. Actually, I was beginning to feel my weak flesh beginning to stir already, and was almost ready to proclaim my remaining youth, when there was a knock at the door.

“Uh oh, there goes your surprise,” I said. For a recluse, I was sure entertaining a lot of visitors lately.

“I wonder who it is. You don’t owe anyone any money.”

I grabbed my jeans and crammed myself into them. “Then it’s got to be somebody trying to borrow,” I said, heading for the peephole in the door.

“From you? You wouldn’t give a copper fîq to a beggar who knew the Secret of the Universe.”

As I got to the door, I looked back at Yasmin. “The universe doesn’t have secrets,” I said cynically, “only lies and swindles.” My indulgent mood vanished in a split second when I looked through the peephole. “Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath. I went back to the bed. “Yasmin,” I said softly, “give me your bag.”

“Why? Who is it?” She found her purse and passed it to me.

I knew she always carried a low-grade seizure gun for protection. I don’t carry a weapon like that; alone and unarmed I walked among the cutthroats of the Budayeen, because I was special, exempt, proud, and stupid. I had these delusions, you see, and I lived a kind of romantic fallacy. I was no more eccentric than your average raving loon. I took the gun and went back to the door. Yasmin watched me, silently and anxiously.

I opened the door. It was Selima. I held the seizure gun pointed between her eyes. “How nice to see you,” I said. “Come on in. There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

“You won’t need the gun, Marîd,” said Selima. She brushed by me, seemed unhappy to see Yasmin, and looked in vain for somewhere to sit. She was extremely uncomfortable, I noticed, and very upset about something.

“So,” I said cruelly, “you just want to get in a few last whacks before somebody lays you out like Tami?”

Selima glowered, reached back, and slapped me hard across the face. I’d earned it.

“Sit on the bed, Selima. Yasmin will move over. As for the gun, it would have come in handy when you and your friends dropped by and started my morning with such a bang. Or don’t you remember about that?”

“Marîd,” she said, licking her glossy red lips, “I’m sorry about that. It was a mistake.”

“Oh, well, that makes it all better, then.” I watched Yasmin cover herself with the sheet and crawl as far away from Selima as she could, with her knees drawn up and her back in the corner. Selima had the immense breasts that was the trademark of the Black Widow Sisters, but otherwise she was almost unmodified. She was naturally prettier than most sex-changes. Tamiko had turned herself into a caricature of the modest and demure geisha; Devi accentuated her East Indian heritage, complete with a caste mark on her forehead to which she was not entitled, and when she was not working, she wore a brightly-colored silk sari, embroidered in gold. Selima, on the contrary, wore the veil and the hooded cloak, a subtle fragrance, and the demeanor of a middle-class Muslim woman of the city. I think, but I’m not sure, that she was religious; I can’t imagine how she squared her thievery and frequent violence with the teachings of the Prophet, may prayers and peace be upon him. I’m not the only self-deluded fool in the Budayeen.

“Please, Marîd, let me explain.” I’d never seen Selima—or either of her Sisters, for that matter—in such a state of near-panic. “You know that Nikki left Tami’s.” I nodded. “I don’t think she wanted to go. I think someone forced her.”

“That isn’t the message
I
got. She wrote me a letter about some German guy and what a wonderful life she was going to have, and that she had a real fish on the line here and she was going to play him for everything he had.”

“We all got the same letter, Marîd. Didn’t you notice anything suspicious about it, though? Maybe you don’t know Nikki’s handwriting as well as I do. Maybe you didn’t pay attention to her choice of words. There were clues in the note that made us think she was trying to get something across between the lines. I think someone was standing over her, making her write the letters so no one would think twice when she disappeared. Nikki was right-handed, and the letters were written with her left hand. The script was awful, nothing like her usual writing. She wrote our notes in French, although she knows perfectly well that none of us understands that language. She spoke English, and both Devi and Tami could have read that; that’s the language she used with them. She never mentioned an old German friend of her family; there may well have been such a man when she was younger, but the way she called herself ‘a shy, introverted little boy,’ well, that just underlined the bad feeling we had about the whole letter. Nikki told lots of stories about her life before she had her change. She was vague about most of the details—where she was really from, things like that—but she always laughed about what a terror she—he—had been. She wanted to be just like us, and so she went into these biographical accounts of her hell-raising. She was anything but shy and introverted. Marîd, that letter smelled from beginning to end.”

I let my hand with the gun drop. Everything Selima had said made sense, now that I thought about it. “That’s why you’re so shaken up,” I said thoughtfully. “You think Nikki’s in some kind of trouble.”

“I think Nikki’s in trouble.” said Selima, “but that’s not why I’m so rabbity. Marîd, Devi’s dead. She’s been murdered, too.”

I closed my eyes and groaned. Yasmin gave a loud gasp; she uttered another superstitious formula—“far from you”—to protect us from the evil that had just been mentioned. I felt weariness, as if I’d overdosed on shocking news and just couldn’t work up the proper reaction. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “let me guess: just like Tami. Burn marks, bruises around her wrists, jammed coming and going, strangled, and her throat cut. And you think someone’s out to get all three of you, and you’re next.”

I was astonished by her reply. “No, you’re wrong. I found her lying in her bed, almost like she was peacefully asleep. She’d been shot, Marîd, with an old-fashioned gun, the kind that used metal bullets. There was a bullet hole exactly centered on her caste mark. No signs of a fight or anything. Nothing disturbed in her apartment. Just Devi, part of her face blown away, a lot of blood splattered on the bedclothes and the walls. I threw up. I’ve never seen anything like it. Those old weapons were so bloody and, well, brutal.” This from a woman who’d slashed enough faces in her time. “I’ll bet no one’s been shot with a bullet in fifty years.” Selima evidently didn’t know about my Russian, whatever his name had been; dead bodies didn’t cause much scandal and gossip in the Budayeen; they weren’t all that rare. Corpses were more of an inconvenience than anything else. Getting large quantities of bloodstains out of nice silk or cashmere is a tedious job.

“Have you called Okking yet?” I asked.

Selima nodded. “It wasn’t his shift. Sergeant Hajjar came and asked all the questions. I wish it’d been Okking instead.”

I knew what she meant. Hajjar was the kind of cop I think of when I think of “cop.” He walked around as if he had a cork up his ass, looking for petty rowdies to blast into grand mal seizures. He had a particular hard-on for Arabs who were inattentive to their spiritual duties: people like me and almost everyone else in the Budayeen.

I put the gun back in Yasmin’s bag. My mood had changed entirely; now suddenly, and for the first time, I felt sympathy for Selima. Yasmin put her hand on Selima’s shoulder in a comforting gesture. “I’ll make some coffee,” I said. I looked at the last Black Widow Sister. “Or would you rather have tea?”

She was grateful for our kindness, and our company, too, I think. “Tea, thank you,” she said. She had begun to calm down.

I put the kettle on to boil. “So just tell me one thing: why
did
the three of you work out your kinks on my body the other day?”

“Allah have mercy on me,” said Selima. She took a folded scrap of paper from her bag and brought it to me. “This is Nikki’s usual handwriting, but it’s obvious she was in a terrible hurry.” The words were written in English, scrawled quickly on the back of an envelope.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Selima glanced at me and quickly looked back down at the paper. “It says, ‘Help. Hurry. Marîd.’ That’s why we did what we did. We misunderstood. We thought you were responsible for whatever trouble she was in. Now I know that you had done her the service of negotiating her release from that pig Abdoulaye, and that she owed you money. She wanted us to let you know that she needed help, but didn’t have time to write anything more. She was probably lucky just to scribble this down.”

I thought about the beating they’d given me; the hours of unconsciousness; the pain I’d suffered and still suffered; the long, nightmarish wait at the hospital; the anger I’d felt toward Nikki; the thousand kiam it had cost me. I added all that up and tried to cancel it. I couldn’t. I still felt an unaccustomed rage inside me, but now it seemed I had no one to vent it on. I looked at Selima. “Just forget it,” I said.